Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. In the first reading of this bill I advised that by accession to the Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment and the Protocol to the Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment, New Zealand will become part of an international system to protect commercial security interests in mobile aircraft equipment. Some 34 States and the European Union have already ratified or acceded to the convention, and 31 States and the European Union to the protocol, so it is clear there is global support for the regime. Likewise, the New Zealand aviation sector and the financial sector have supported accession. It is worth repeating that the estimated financial savings over the next 6 years to the aviation industry, including to Air New Zealand, could range from $18 million for savings in export credit guarantees to a figure as high as $325 million in reduced financial charges. The benefits will continue into the foreseeable future.

The Government is pleased to be able finally to bring these opportunities to the aviation industry. I appreciate the support given to this bill across the House, and therefore to the Government’s intention to accede to the Cape Town Convention and the Aircraft Protocol, by members on both sides of the House. Similarly, members’ support of the amendments the bill makes to streamline the rule-making process will ensure that our rules do not lag behind developments in the aviation sector. I commend this bill to the House.

The Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill has made good progress through the House this afternoon. It has met with support from right across the political spectrum in a way that we do not often see in the House. Obviously members have reflected on it and believe it will be of practical application to New Zealand, to people who travel, and to people who export. As I said in my first reading speech, I hope it will also, critically, enable those in developing countries—be they State-run airlines or private enterprise airlines—that face significant barriers to entry into this market to offer airline services for passenger and freight flights around the world. That has to be seen as a good thing; it cuts the cost of business. This bill does not necessarily, of itself, change the quantity of flights that are taken, but it acts as a way of providing security for those who lease out these very expensive types of equipment and for those who seek to operate them, to ensure that they are able to offer people all around the world, in some of the most impoverished parts of the world, access to these sorts of services for their economic and social development.

I acknowledge the points that the Green Party made in respect of the environment. It is a matter of enormous regret that we hardly ever hear Government legislation explained in any context of sustainability. That seems to be very much out of vogue with the present Government, but I hope that with continued activism on these issues by parties on this side of the House, we can make sure that those issues are taken into account as legislation is developed. When we are incorporating an international treaty, it somewhat limits the ability of the New Zealand Government to make changes, but it would have been nice if at least we had heard some reference to sustainability from Ministers as they spoke. That did not happen today. There was more of a limited view on the dollars and cents aspect, and not looking at the opportunities this might provide for people in some of the poorest parts of the world.

During the Committee of the whole House a number of questions were asked of the Minister of Transport. He took the last speech in that part of the bill’s consideration. His answer to some of the questions was to simply reread the clauses that were already published, which was not entirely helpful, because we already had them. But he did answer questions in a couple of areas. He was silent on the aspects of obligations, which my colleague Darien Fenton mentioned. I was interested that he did not pick up the issue of consultation, because that is what one of the clauses we debated in the Committee stage was about. As we sum up the bill and sum up what it does, one of the reasons we questioned that issue is that we know this Minister has a unique definition of “consultation”. Some of the processes he follows for consultation are not the standard ones that we would see in many other places.

💬 Hon Steven Joyce: That’s unfair.

Let me give him one example. This is the Minister who rolled up to the Kapiti coast one day and said that, despite what his party campaigned for in Opposition, he was going to build a four-lane, 100-kilometre expressway through the community. He asked them to let him know what they thought about it in 4 weeks’ time, as he was not very busy for the next month, so he said they could kick the tyres. He asked them to let him know what they thought about it. I suspect as that plan goes through more and more tyres will be kicked, and some of them will be on the Minister’s Crown car.

💬 Hon Clayton Cosgrove: What about the optics?

The optics get worse and worse on some of these things when we do not consult, which is why we are pleased that this civil aviation bill is an example of consultation. Parliament has come together, united on it.

The Minister’s other definition of “consultation” is that if he lived in an area 35 years ago, and if he heard of something when he was growing up there as a teenage boy, he can come back years later and say that they all knew about it, because he remembers it from when he was a teenager on roller skates. This is the definition of something that everyone should expect!

Putting aside what everyone had thought for the previous 20 years would be the case, the expressway proposal for Kapiti that he is advancing is a disaster. I am pleased that he has at least one bill on which he is able to bring Parliament together. What we wanted in Kapiti was Transmission Gully; a local western link road; improvements to State Highway 1; a commitment to our rail services to push electrification further north, up to Levin, Ōtaki, and Shannon; and the electrification and double tracking that would have ensured quality, reliable, and affordable public transport services.

I guess what I am saying, as we sum up the bill, is that there are two ways of operating. The Minister gets a big tick for this bill—10 out of 10. We will all vote for it. But some of the unusual approaches he has taken to other areas of the transport portfolio are, I think, worthy of mention at this point.

Labour has offered its support for the bill. The reasons are obvious and manifest, so I will not take any more time now other than to say that I hope the kinds of arrangements that should flow from this convention actually do flow. I am sure that the officials, who have worked very hard on making this legislation acceptable in the New Zealand context, will be monitoring it and will be in a position to offer advice as time goes on, on whether it has had the ability to meet its objectives, particularly the objectives that members have drawn to the attention of the House and the Committee today, which are the things that we see as being most important to the passage of this bill. The Labour Opposition offers its support for the third reading of the bill.

I am speaking in respect of the Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Most members of the House have exercised the debate on this bill very fully today, and it looks as though there is full support across the House, and that is good to see.

The bill amends domestic legislation and some company insolvency and statutory management legislation to enable New Zealand to take part in the convention, known as the Cape Town Convention, and associated protocols in respect of basic aircraft equipment—basically, the Aircraft Protocol and the Cape Town Convention. Those two important documents then become part of our legislative framework in New Zealand.

The bill amends the powers in the Civil Aviation Act in relation to the making of civil aviation rules. New Zealand’s use of the Cape Town Convention and the Aircraft Protocol will support an international legal regime regarding security interests in aircraft, and potentially enable most aircraft operators to secure savings in funding and transaction costs in future aircraft acquisitions.

This bill is important. It gives us some consistency with other countries and with international obligations. It enables some flexibility in terms of civil aviation rule-making, to strike a balance between our international and domestic requirements so that we are more responsive to changes that may occur in the aviation sector. All parties look as though they are supporting the legislation, so we thank them for their support and for the way that this bill has gone through the House today. I commend this bill to the House.

I am delighted to take a call in the third reading of the Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill 2010. I think it has been a very, very interesting debate this afternoon. One never knows what topics will come to the House that will take us into all sorts of interesting territories, and I think we have had some very good discussions on this bill. I am pleased that the Labour Opposition is supporting the third reading. I want to go back and reinforce the work of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and the officials. Obviously a lot of work has gone into this bill; there is no doubt about that. Negotiations have been involved, and the officials have been involved in them. I thank the officials who work in our Public Service, who work for the people of New Zealand, for all of their work that goes on behind the scenes. I also thank them again for their efforts to try to help us understand what is indeed a very technical bill, but we all seem to understand that it is a very, very good thing, and that is why we are supporting it.

I wanted to pick up my colleague Carol Beaumont’s point about consultation. I think this is a good model of consultation that the Government could consider for future bills. I was looking at the national interest analysis, which talks about the consultation that took place. Obviously this was started under the previous Labour-led Government, so there was consultation with the aviation sector, the Financial Services Federation, and Toll NZ in 2005-06, and then in May 2009 further consultation was conducted with a range of parts of the aviation sector and aviation stakeholders.

It is interesting to go through them. There was a variety of views to start with on this bill. Air New Zealand, of course, first proposed consideration of accession, and as a group of companies continues to support accession. I am pleased, just speaking about Air New Zealand, that I have had the opportunity again today to commend our national airline, to say how proud we are, and to say how thankful we are that a Labour-led Government rescued it—

💬 Hon Member: Bought it.

—bought it, for the people of New Zealand, and it is a very high-quality, high-standard airline. The 8,000 workers who work for Air New Zealand do a fantastic job.

Airwork (NZ) Ltd supports accession to the convention. The Qantas Group is no longer here, but its subsidiary, Jetconnect, was neutral, but it has now decided to support accession. Pacific Blue was originally supportive, but it did not respond on the subject of internal transactions, so I do not know what happened with it. The Aviation Industry Association of New Zealand can see benefits to industry from accession, and remains supportive. The Flight Safety Foundation was originally supportive, provided that internal transactions were excluded from coverage, but it has since agreed to internal transactions being covered. The Royal New Zealand Aero Club, which is a general aviation interest group, supports accession. Toll NZ supports accession to the convention, and it wants to be consulted in the future regarding accession to the protocol on railway rolling stock, and KiwiRail has now confirmed that position. Vincent Aviation Ltd supports accession. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association was consulted but did not respond, and then a range of ministries were also consulted.

As I have said, the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee then examined this treaty. With the assistance of officials, we were given a very good explanation. As I said, it is a highly technical convention, so we really appreciated the fact that there was a briefing to the committee, because sometimes select committees can decide that these things are just a little bit too boring and that there should be just a standard report back to the House. We did not do that; we asked for a briefing. As I said, we appreciate the efforts that the officials went to in order to help us to understand the convention.

So I am pleased that Labour is supporting this bill. As I said, we have had an opportunity to traverse many areas in this debate. There are some issues that I would like to repeat very briefly on the matters of conventions. We are disappointed that we seem to be able to support some conventions but not others. Other conventions would do something about the fundamental rights and protections for workers, in particular, and other members have talked about other conventions. There are some civil aviation authority issues, there are some air transport issues, and there are some safety issues. I am interested in those, and, again, I think the Civil Aviation Authority does a fantastic job with the scarce amount of resources it has. I had a bit of a concern that it would be expected to implement this convention with no extra resources. We asked the Minister about that, but we received no response.

In closing, I thank everybody again—the officials in particular. It is good to be part of a bill that the whole of Parliament is supporting, and we are pleased to support it.

I was not going to take a call on the third reading of the Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, but given that Minister Joyce is here I thought I would take the opportunity to do so.

First of all, I would like to send my best wishes to Tau Henare, who is a member of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. I thank the officials who have worked on this bill for all the hard work that has gone into it. I would also like to thank Darien Fenton for her contribution to this debate. There are other conventions that we probably should be discussing, and it would probably be more fitting to be discussing them under urgency rather than this bill.

I am glad I am supporting this bill, and I am glad that the Greens are in this House and are able to raise the environmental issues. It is a pity the Minister of Transport was not here for my second reading speech, but I am sure he will eagerly look it up in Hansard to find out about the climatic and environmental impacts of our airline industry.

I heard the Minister pick up on the figure that we could be saving—up to $325 million. That is not a figure to sneeze at, but I guess it is in the context of other wasteful spending by this Government, including the “Pūhoi to Wellsford Holiday Highway”, which has a benefit-cost ratio of 0.8, meaning we will not see any extra benefit economically from this one project. I would like to see more prioritising from this Government on where it is putting its transport focus and where it is spending its scarce transport dollars.

I talked a little bit about the environmental cost, but what I would like to touch on now is the opportunity cost of this bill. I would have preferred it if we were discussing the sustainability issues around the aircraft industry, because there are things—and I addressed them in my second reading speech—that we could be doing right now to lessen the greenhouse gas emissions and the environmental impacts of aircraft industries on the planet, on the climate, and also on the communities that are impacted by both noise pollution and particulate soup pollution.

I think we could have been debating the Sustainable Biofuel Bill, which is still on the Order Paper. It was introduced by my colleague and predecessor Jeanette Fitzsimons. Air New Zealand has been using atrophy in its air fleets as a biofuel alternative to kerosene. I think this is something that needs more investigation to make sure, for people and the planet, that the sustainability of the fuel is ensured.

I would have liked to be speaking about our rail lines in New Zealand. I would have liked to be talking about a Hamilton to Auckland rail link, for example, which could help to reduce the demand for air services and be more efficient, more cost-efficient, and more economically sane than what we are seeing. This is what we are seeing overseas. Governments and private companies are putting more focus on fast and more efficient rail links than on expanding a greenhouse gas - causing aircraft industry. Once again, I lament the use of urgency. I feel it is pointless, especially in relation to this bill. It did not need to go through under urgency.

Lastly, I challenge other members of this House to be like the Green Party and maybe consider offsetting their flights. It is a privilege as a member to use domestic air travel in New Zealand. We all know that the impact of one flight to the UK is more than a Swedish citizen will emit in an entire year—just one flight. We are spending hundreds of tonnes of carbon on our budgets. I challenge all members to take up the Landcare challenge and think about offsetting their own flights from their own personal budgets, and pressuring the Speaker to see whether the House can do it for us. Kia ora.

It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak on the third reading of the Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill 2010. I thank the previous speaker, Gareth Hughes, for his challenge; I will certainly think seriously about it. It has been a very interesting debate. Perhaps, if I am honest, I would say that it has been more interesting than I expected it to be.

💬 Grant Robertson: But you had low expectations.

Ha, ha!

I am a member of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, which received a presentation on the matters around the Cape Town Convention. Again, I join with colleagues in thanking officials for the work they did on that convention. It is important that New Zealand signs up to relevant international conventions. The convention and the associated Aircraft Protocol deals with a serious matter, and that, of course, is about items that are by their nature very mobile—that is, aircraft—and about the fact that those who are financing those aircraft need to know the status of those aircraft. It provides for a simply accessed registry based in Ireland, and that is positive.

The full wording of the convention and the associated protocol are part of this bill, and will be included in schedules to the Civil Aviation Act. It standardises transactions involving movable property and sets down international standards for registration of ownership and for securing the interests of all parties. As was said earlier, that is important, particularly in relation to the fact that, otherwise, rules are based on domestic legislation in different countries, and that is not really very helpful with something like a plane, which moves all around the world.

The other matter the bill contains is, of course, the ordinary rule, which tries to clarify—let us be straightforward about this—how civil aviation rule-making is done. It provides for ordinary rules to be determined by the authority, the director, or other persons, and it imposes requirements and conditions on those rules. As I outlined in some detail, consultation requirements must be observed before ordinary rules are amended. Those include the requirement on the Minister to publish a notice of his or her intention to make the rule, and to consult.

I reinforce the point that has been made by a number of speakers, including myself, that consultation requirements are important. We need to have confidence that consultation is not just window dressing or something done in an ad hoc manner, but is taken very, very seriously. I hope that the Minister of Transport has taken that on board in this discussion. Certainly, in relation to many other matters, consultation has been a sham. I use the Auckland super-city as an example of very poor consultation and of disenfranchising the people of Auckland, of whom I am one.

Also I touched on the work of the Civil Aviation Authority, and I acknowledge that agency. It is doing a very important job. It is a very serious area, with a lot of security issues and safety issues for the travelling public and for the people who work in that industry. They have a wide range of responsibilities, which I outlined.

A number of us have commented on the fact that signing up to international conventions is important in terms of playing our role globally. New Zealand has always taken those responsibilities seriously. The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, of course, covers both transport matters and what are called industrial relations matters but are broadly employment issues. I have raised, as my colleague Darien Fenton did, our concern in relation to employment matters that perhaps New Zealand, through various actions of this Government, is at risk of getting into difficulty with international best practice in the employment relations area.

Interestingly enough, the Civil Aviation Authority, in its annual report, covers matters relating to employment issues. I thought it was worth noting that and congratulating the authority on the fact that it has a good-employer programme. The programme covers seven main areas: leadership, accountability, and culture; recruitment, selection, and induction; employee development, promotion, and exit; flexibility in work design; remuneration, recognition, and conditions; harassment and bullying prevention; and safe and healthy environment matters. So both the transport and employment relations matters are together in one annual report, and I acknowledge and thank the Civil Aviation Authority for its efforts in terms of being a good employer.

It is a pleasure to join with my colleagues and stand to speak on this bill. We are, of course, continuing to support it.

Bill read a third time.